


Overruled By Fate

by mific



Category: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Genre: Elizabethan, F/M, Fanart, Fanfiction, M/M, Music, Poetry, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 14:28:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5459804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mific/pseuds/mific
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marlowe, Eve, and Adam, near the beginning of it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Overruled By Fate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [obstinatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/obstinatrix/gifts).



> Written for Yuletide 2015, for Obstinatrix, who said: "I would really love anything about how Adam and Eve found each other, their life together, how it was in the early days of vampiring about, what on earth happened with Kit Marlowe -- actually anything as long as there is Eve in it." I chose to focus on the Elizabethan era - hope you like it!  
> I've chosen not to warn, but of course, this being about vampires, there's major character death of a sort, and blood.  
> Big thanks to Persiflager for beta-reading and helpful feedback.
> 
> The title is from _Hero and Leander_ , by Kit Marlowe.  
> Oh, and, bonus fanart :) (largely courtesy of Hilliard).  
> Other than the quote from _Hero and Leander_ , Kit's verses are by me. 
> 
> If you want to get in the mood with some period music, here's a small playlist:  
> [In Darkness Let Me Dwell - John Dowland](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKnLEGGfvRg)  
> [Out of the Deep - Orlando Gibbons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOca_PA4E8&list=PL85_RiT9FDAFPDTr2ZxAVfWRDcz28MZ2I&index=14)  
> [Sorrow Stay - John Dowland](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ild9--ip0k)

~~ooOoo~~

 

\--- Marlowe -- Eve -- Adam -- Ava ---

 

~~ooOoo~~

**1595**

~~ooOoo~~

_Perfidious knave, creature of vilest form,_  
_All is forever changed since thy foul kiss,_  
_In Deptford, where I played at agency,_  
_Serving a queen, ’til Frizer, foulest fiend,_  
_Took all: life, warmth, blood, sunlight and the rest._

Kit chewed his pen, staring at the verse. Trite, as ever. He crossed out _~~and the rest~~_ , quill hovering as he racked his brains for a more felicitous phrase. A blot of ink splattered the parchment and in a burst of rage he flung the quill across the room where it lodged in his third best shirt, discarded beside the disordered, unused bed. A black stain spread in the linen folds.

“Satan’s hairy, buggering arse!”

He lurched to his feet, knocking over the chair, and paced the small room. The walls loomed and wavered, lit by the guttering fire and his single candle. “Arse! Scabrous, pox-ridden . . . ”

He ran out of imprecations at the door, leaning on it, breathing hard, forehead pressed to the rough wood. He struck the boards futilely with his hands, swallowing a sob. No point smashing his fists: he’d tried all that in the bleak days after Deptford. Cutting, hanging, poison. He’d even jumped in the Thames – he shuddered, recalling the stench. Nothing availed: he was near-indestructible, it seemed. Indestructibly dead.

He should have known better than to try yet again to put pen to paper to record that day in Deptford. All attempts hitherto had met with failure and tantrums: the magnitude of what he had suffered, what he’d lost, was beyond even Kit Marlowe’s talents to translate. And to what purpose?  ’Twould never be published. He barked out a laugh.

They’d covered it up, of course. Poley and his demonic creature Frizer, abetted by that snivelling rat Skeres. He’d been insensible for a time after Frizer’s assault and they’d stuck a dagger in his eye socket for appearances – the coroner was a fool, unable to tell a dead man from one in the process of becoming undead. Unliving. Poley had mocked up a coffin filled with rocks and cast him out into the stews of the city, his inconvenient politics and tongue forever silenced.

His eye had healed, although how that was possible he had no notion. Not when all else had ceased and he had no heartbeat, no spit or piss or shit or sweat. No seed ever more, from the poor useless thing ’twixt his legs.

How had he come to this? He’d not been monstrous, not a child killer or a ravening beast, wallowing in a trough of violence and carnality. Well, mayhap there’d been _some_ carnal wallowing, with partners who’d pleased him. Well-muscled youths with a shapely leg who cared little whether the mouth playing their horn was attached to breasts or no. And Kit had such a pretty mouth.

Poley and his cronies had accused him of atheism, of scorning scripture. And of coining. He might be godless—and now soulless—but the coining had been sheer falsehood. It mattered not – Marlowe was cold in his grave for all the world knew, while Kit went on, regardless.

He righted the chair and sank into it, head in hands, staring at the scribbled lines of ink. Blank verse was better for volume—look at Will Shakespeare, churning out plays as though the Devil rode his fingers—but rhyme had . . . more import. And by God, the day Frizer sank his teeth into Kit’s throat in Deptford called for _import_.

He reached out absently, fingers closing around the handle of the pewter tankard. Lifting it, he drank, the blood sliding down his throat in a slick river, slaking the constant, gnawing thirst like snow on embers. The rush hit him then and his mouth fell open in a groan of ecstasy as it flooded through him, pooling inside his ribcage and loins and running out along each limb, making him twitch and shake. Pleasure. More pleasure than any bed-partner had ever given him; almost enough to . . . 

No. ’Twas bare compensation, the price too steep. He did not venture out often to feed, but each time reminded him that he might not have been monstrous before Frizer turned him, but he was a foul thing now, no matter how little the world missed each murderous cutpurse he dragged off to drain. The very nature of his prey proclaimed his degradation.  He was worse than the rats, a blot in the darkest heart of the city, severed from friends and love and everything good and bright.

Kit slammed to his feet and out the door, skidding down the stairs and out into the foetid night in search of a tavern where none knew Kit Marlowe, muse’s darling, and he could watch the warm-blooded cavort as though death were not seated at their very elbow. Where he could watch what was lost to him forever and stave off madness for a bare few hours ’til the killing sun rose and he slunk back into the shadows with the rest of London’s vermin.

If only he were brave enough to burn.

~~ooOoo~~

He chanced upon them on the second night.

Kit had left the city, unable to endure the squalor of his life for even one more rat-infested hour, and had taken the road north, moving by night and hiding from the lens of day.

He saw the great bulk of it on the crest of a hill, backed by moon-raddled clouds, and at first, mistook it for a haystack. Then he saw the still forms all around and realised that it was closer than he’d thought, that it was an overturned coach, and that the unmoving bundles on the road and the verge were corpses.

Villains on horseback who preyed on travellers were common enough, Kit knew. Only a monster such as he could risk journeying alone, although travelling in company had not saved this party. Perhaps it had been a murderous band, striking in force. They’d stolen the horses.

A groan from the far side of the coach snapped his head around. It might have stopped his heart with fright, were that organ not already silenced. Two women, he saw. Moneyed, from their clothing, the elder half-shielding the younger, looking to have tried to drag them both into the lee of the fallen coach.

The faint beat of blood in their veins called to Kit as it ever did, so they were alive, but barely. Both had been stabbed more than once, and when he pulled aside their cloaks, their garments were blood-drenched. They smelled delicious.

He became aware that he was being watched. It was the elder, her hair silver in the moonlight. Her eyes glinted in a pale face, all planes and angles. Kit stopped licking the blood from his hand and watched her, wary.

“Thou’rt not one of the bastards that near killed us . . . art thou a demon?” Her voice was thready, but surprisingly deep.

“Of a sort,” he answered. “But no, not the author of this carnage. Not all evil, it seems, can be laid at my door.”

A barn owl glided overhead, and Kit glanced up, annoyed. Did the night need any more dramatic flourishes? Christ, ’twas as bad as one of Will Shakespeare’s over-long tragedies.

His face must have caught the moonlight, for the woman below him gasped. “Marlowe? But thou’rt dead, killed in a brawl.”

Kit grimaced. “So Poley tells it. There was no brawl in Deptford, but I am surely dead.” He put a hand on her wrist where the pulse fluttered like a trapped sparrow. “As will thou be, ere long, and thy companion.”

“My sister,” she whispered. “Ava. I am Eve.”

He sat back on his heels. “And I the well known and thoroughly deceased Kit Marlowe, playwright and poet, at thy service. Did we know each other when last I had breath and life?”

“I saw . . . all thy plays,” she said faintly. “They had . . . great promise.”

Kit offered her a wry smile. “My thanks. I’m ever pleased for a good review, e’en if the words be thy last.”

She coughed weakly and a bubble of dark blood broke on her lips, and trickled down her chin. “We have . . . gold. I can pay . . . ” He could hear in her voice that she did not believe this plight one any quantity of gold could remedy.

He eyed her, considering. She was beautiful, her strange, almost mannish face pale as his own in the moonlight. He should not, but he was so very sick of being naught but a death-bringer, of evil and filth and endings. She and her sister were at the end, anyway.

And she had liked his plays.

“I died in Deptford, and yet here thou seest me, undead. A dark thing turned me and I can turn thee, and thy sister, into what I am. ’Tis a devil’s bargain, though.”

“I’ll hear the terms . . . ” she whispered. She had spirit, close to death as she was.

“Life forever, but ’tis unlife – a living death. No heart, no warmth, and there is thirst. I must drink blood to exist.”

“Is there . . . pain?” Her voice was very faint.

“Not of the body. Perhaps of the spirit, and I doubt I’ve a soul – but then as a famous atheist I never held with such things.”

Her face flickered briefly in what might have been a smile. “I am godless also . . . although not famous.”

Kit gave her a thin smile. “ ’Tis not wise to be, in these times. Men have lost their heads for less.”

“Are there . . . no compensations, for this . . . state?”

“I had not thought so, ’til tonight.” Kit shrugged. “I can still write, but I cannot publish.”

“Then . . . thou’rt no worse off . . . than many who wield a pen.” She made a faint rasping noise and he thought her death was on her. The fierce pang of loss took him by surprise. But no, it was a laugh.

Kit frowned. “I fear there is little time.”

“Then do’t,” she whispered. “I’ve yet to finish . . . _Hero and Leander_.”

“We cannot have thee expiring mid-epic,” Kit said, shaking his head. He looked at the younger woman, who remained insensible. “What of thy sister?”

“I am her guardian . . . and what e’er I have, she must have. ’Twas ever thus. An’ I kept her from this . . . adventure, she’d sulk for eternity . . . and haunt me.”

Kit inclined his head. “So be it.”

~~ooOoo~~

**1625**

~~ooOoo~~

Candelabra flickered against the panelled walls as Eve walked the length of the gallery, the small heels of her silk slippers rapping faintly on the polished boards. She preferred their quiet country manor in Norfolk, towards which she and Ava had been travelling when their coach was attacked, but there was no denying the company was more entertaining, here in their London mansion.

She had inherited her father’s estates upon his death, well prior to Kit’s encountering them in extremity. Their father had expired of a wasting sickness and Eve, being thoroughly of age, unmarried and now handily bereft of male relatives intent to rule her, became Ava’s guardian.

Their mother had died of childbed fever after Ava’s birth, so Eve had been all the mother Ava had known. Perhaps she had failed at that task, as Ava—who would never come of age now, frozen forever in her minority—had ever been spoiled. By Eve, by her father, by the servants.

Eve wondered if Ava would have matured had Marlowe not turned them. She had shown precious little sign of it before being bitten, and even less in the intervening years, having run off to the continent three months since, where she was doubtless terrorising the salons of Paris.

The music drifting down the gallery drew Eve on towards the parlour, and she wondered which musicians Dowland had gathered to play with him tonight. He had taken well to the undead life, but Lord, how he did love to dramatize. ‘In Darknesse Let Me Dwell’, indeed.

The lutenist playing now sounded livelier than Dowland’s usual sombre measures, and the music was new to Eve, plaintive yet compelling, moving between dance and dirge and forcing her feet to trip its measure.

Kit stood up from his seat by the fire as she entered, smiling as he bussed her cheek. He now sported a trim beard, and with his pallor and hollowed cheeks, did not look very like the Marlowe of old. Given that he was thirty years dead, it was disguise enough for those visitors from the living world who frequented their nocturnal circle of writers, artists, and musicians.

Nick Hilliard had been a friend, and was sore missed, a great talent forever lost. Eve possessed many of his miniatures, for he’d loved to paint Kit. Her favourite showed Kit against flames – Hilliard was wont to paint fair young men thus, signifying the fire of passion. Kit joked that it was a foretaste of Hell, but she knew full well that, despite their own immortal state—perhaps because of it—he did not believe in Hell, and most certainly not in Heaven.

“Come, Eve, and meet our new friend, fresh from Oxford. Dowland says he can make a lute sing most sweetly.”

Eve nodded to Dowland, and gave the lutenist her hand. He kissed it, his lips blood-warm on her cold hand, but then, it was November. No-one heated all the rooms in a house such as this – a fortune she might have, but not for long, if ’twere frittered away.

The musician lingered over her hand then looked up, smiling, and she saw he was not as young as she had surmised, being about thirty. She herself was frozen in time, forever five and forty. An old maid, yes, and ever would be, but she had good bones and some thought her handsome.

“Milady, I’m honoured.”

“Please, call me Eve. And thou’rt?”

He made a wry face. “Adam, as chance would have it.”

“Less chance and more thy parents’ whim, I think.”

“Aye, ’tis a family name.”

“For all of mankind, so the priests tell us.”

“I am not yet so venerable, nor so wise as my namesake.” He ushered her to a seat on the settle by his side, his mouth under the neat moustache curved in a teasing grin. Flirting, then? A pleasant change from many of Kit’s friends who were often unmoved by the fair sex.

“Time enough for that, do thou but forswear apples.” Eve settled her skirts.

“Indeed. Having attained Eden I’d fain stay a while in thy company and not be driven off by chastising angels.” Oh, he was a charmer, green eyes sparkling wickedly.

“Shalt play for us?”

“Aye, indeed. What wilt thou hear?”

“Something new.”

Smiling, he took up the lute and closed his eyes. Eve followed suit, letting the unfamiliar strains curl over her, now lyrical, now melancholy, building intricately to a final stirring passage that wove all together.

She let the last notes fade before opening her eyes, seeing that his were still closed. Then he looked up and drew a shuddering breath, and smiled. Eve smiled back, and they gazed at each other, beaming like two fools until Kit cleared his throat and engaged Dowland in some trivial banter about his latest commission.

Later, Eve would look back on this moment and remember Kit’s words from _Hero and Leander_ : ‘who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’  It was foolish, an infatuation. But she had ever been moved by beauty and he seemed to walk in it, trailing music.

Later still, she would see the darkness in him, mixed with the beauty and the music, and love him all the more.

For now, Adam played, and they talked and flirted and had eyes for no others, long after Dowland had taken his leave and Kit retired—not to bed, for none of them slept—but to polish his latest sonnet. Adam fell asleep with his head in her lap, close to dawn, but Eve did not move – the parlour’s curtains were heavy and would shield her from encroaching day. She stroked his hair and mourned the brief time they might have, even if something came of this – and how could it, with her a cold, inhuman thing, and Adam mortal, pulsing with lifeblood and song?

Kit had not warned of this consequence, crouched by the ruined coach. There was fine print in any contract—more so in a devil’s bargain—but she had not foreseen that there might be many more losses after the first, lest her heart be kept chaste as her body. Kit had mastered the trick, but chastity of the heart, it seemed, was not a talent she possessed. This dalliance with Adam would not last, it could not. He would lose interest, forsaking her arms for a warmer welcome.

Adam did not lose interest, however, instead spending every night with her, talking and arguing and making music. Making love, with his eyes and hands and quicksilver mind.

She went to Marlowe in the end, who cocked a brow at her. “I’ll not ask if thou lovest him, for ’tis obvious to all with eyes.”

“Aye, which gives the lie to the seat of love being in the heart, for mine is frozen and yet I burn, Kit, I burn.”

“Then there’s a choice thou must make, dear one. And so must Adam.”

Eve chose to tell him. Adam chose to turn.

“How could I not,” he said, holding her close. “To hear music change and grow across all of time, and in some small way, play my part in it. And withall, to have thee with me: beautiful, unchanging, deathless.”

“But the cost . . . ”

He stilled her with a kiss. “I’ll pay’t, and gladly.”

And so he did, tasting her for the first time, the sight of his blood-smeared mouth filling her with dark longing. He took to the blood like a lover coming home, which gave her a moment’s pause until she thought how Marlowe had had to pry her off his arm, there by the coach, and Ava, in her turn. It was the bargain they’d made and ’twas better  to be honest about it, since they must lie to the world about all else.

Art and monstrosity, all in one package. And they would see the future – Eve, for her sins, had ever been curious.

~~ooOoo~~

 

_I was not always thus, a thing of night,_  
_Once did I go abroad in brightest day._  
_Even though self-confined the more to write,_  
_Still could I venture forth to see a play._

_But all was lost, and I was ever changed,_  
_Brought low by enemies who wished me ill._  
_From all things good and right was I estranged,_  
_And I despaired, and hid, and lost all will._

_Then did I chance upon thee, dearest Eve,_  
_And in unmaking thee, redemption found._  
_Now hast Eve’s rib made Adam out of love,_  
_For such as we are not by scripture bound._

_Thus out of death comes love, from one comes two,_  
_And though the price be high, we’re forged anew._

 

“Oh my darling, ’tis . . . ” Eve passed the parchment to Adam and gathered Kit into her arms, holding him tight. “ ’Tis beautiful.”

Kit took a moment to be glad they had not lost the comfort of touch, with all else they’d forfeited. “There’s a false rhyme in the third stanza—‘love’ and ‘Eve’—but perfection ever eludes the poor poet.”

Adam finished reading the sonnet in turn and clapped Kit on the shoulder. “Thou'rt an old romantic, Marlowe. So much for that claptrap about thy ‘cold, dead heart’. Surely softer heart ne’er failed to beat.”

“Ha! Very droll.” Marlowe poured them all a goblet and sank back on the settle. Eve’s newly acquired Venetian glasses were deepest ruby and the blood glinted darkly within. “To poetry and to love.”

They drank. Marlowe was content to let the blood wash through him as he watched the lovers kiss, seeing them ride the blood-tide with sensual touches as they twined on cushions strewn on the floor, even though there could be no consummation.

He took another sip. He had not, when still living, explored the joys of voyeurism, too much in the grip of his own flesh-bound lusts to seek vicarious pleasure. Eve and Adam knew full well he was watching. They did not object, indeed he felt that they welcomed it – that his eyes on them fuelled touches and kisses as they licked the blood from each others’ mouths.

He smiled into the goblet. Perhaps, in some way, they were making a gift of their love and their beauty. Thanking him. Well, when he next found a lover who cared more for his clever mouth and hands than whether blood pulsed in his veins, he might return the favour. He found the idea somewhat arousing, so far as that was still possible. Blood was his main source of animal pleasure now, so he watched, and sipped, and lost himself for a time.

Later, when the candles had burned low, Adam took up his lute and sat on a bench, plucking a lilting tune. “Write me some verses that can be set to music, Marlowe. Sonnets are better for declaiming than for song.”

“Aye, all in good time,” Kit said lazily.

Eve had drawn her knees up, seated at Adam's feet, her head resting back against his legs. After the notes of the lute died away, she spoke. “Thou hast the work, Kit—the plays and poetry—and Adam has his music. I am but a lily of the field, albeit thy patron. ’Tis not so much upon which to build forever.”

Kit set the lute aside and ran a hand through her hair. “There’s love, to nourish us.”

“Aye, dearest Eve,” said Kit, “and thou’rt that most valuable of all things.”

She tilted her head, pushing back into Adam’s caress. “Which is?”

“Our audience.” He spread his hands, _quod erat demonstrandum_. “Without appreciation, without praise and criticism, art languishes forlorn. Love is not merely ’twixt men and women, ’tis what drives us in all things.”

Eve smiled. “Then a toast. To love sustaining us, through all eternity.”

They lifted their glasses, and drank.

~~  the end  ~~

**Author's Note:**

> For plot reasons, I've had them all become vampires fairly close together in time and age. Why then, you may ask, is Marlowe so much more ancient and raddled-looking in the movie? In my head-canon, he just hasn't taken as much care of himself over the centuries. And I know there's a hint in the movie that Eve might have been around in the Middle Ages, but I've chosen to ignore that.


End file.
